Rambling Ken

Virtual appliances on my Mac

Just installed VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop on my Mac. Wanted to start mucking with the available virtual images out there, and start hand-crafting my own to get a feeling for how to not only make and distribute images, but use the tools that can convert between them. One such tutorial can be found at Virtualization Daily. Another option from Parallels is Transporter.

I'll be putting together (and chronicling the process here) of migrating between the different virtual disk formats, and trying some of the different appliances.

My first impressions are that Parallels seems to bog my Mac down less than VMWare, but that's on a 2Ghz MacBook with 1Gig of memory, 512Meg for the virtual machines. When running just the image, with everything else shut off, they both perform pretty well, and almost comically better than Virtual PC did on my dual processor G5. That's after turning Fusion's debugging off (it's on by default). When on, it was really sluggish, and I wasn't very happy with the results.

Parallels has some cooler look-and-feel bits, but VMware has the feeling of having done this before, and knowing what you'll need.

One totally unscientific test, I opened a Jumpbox mediawiki image I had in both Parallels and VMware format, the Parallels one came up about 30 seconds faster than the VMware one. But, it's not fair or scientific, since I don't have enough memory for them both to run without some sort of interference yet.

More later, just a quick note as to what I'm experimenting with.

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Posted at 12:28PM Apr 26, 2007 by kenwallich in Personal  |  Comments[0]